Historical background

There was everything on the site house number 58 on the Moika: English Club, a French restaurant, and now the Hotel Arcadia.

Huge house, three times wider and twice as its neighbors, has appeared on the waterfront in 1913. His client was made by Frenchman Jouin Almir, the owner of a luxury restaurant "Kontan", which was located in a garden in the depths of the site - in place of the current kindergarten and cozy hotel is situated "Arcadia". A garden that remains from the estate procurator-general of the Senate Nikita Trubetskoy that lived here until 1762.

English Club

At the beginning of the XIX century site on the corner of the Embankment and Gorokhovaya acquired merchant Christopher Tal. In the house of Tal in 1813 and 1830 was about indoor men's English Club, founded in 1770 and lasted until 1917. His motto - Concordia et Laetitia ("Consent and joy") - pointed to the pastime among equals. The club came to read newspapers, discuss the political news, play pool, cards, drink a glass of wine. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, dinners were held. Membership in the English congregation testified to the aristocratic spirit and position in society. Elders at a time when the meeting lodge in the house of Tal, were not the last people of the capital: Prince Kutuzov, Count Arakcheev Count Paskevich. In 1822 the club joined the writers Zhukovsky Shakhovskoy, in 1823-meters - Grech, but Thaddeus Bulgarin, publisher selling newspaper "Northern Bee", in 1827 blackball. Pushkin was admitted to the "club" in the 1832 meters and was there until the end of his life, though treating the chosen institution ironically.

Restaurant "Kontan"

Location of the hotel "Arcadia" at the famous station house number 56 is no accident. Since ancient times it was a prestigious place for relaxation and comfort. In the 1830's heirs divided the land Tal and is often sold and new owners have erected new buildings on it. House number 56 on the corner of the Embankment and Gorokhovaya - the oldest in the quarter. Contemporaries remembered with great pleasure the restaurant Kontan "which opened at the Sink in 1884. He was named, like all top-class restaurants - Kyuba "," Borel "," Dussault "- the surname of the owner. Famous for its excellent cuisine and the Romanian virtuoso orchestra. Arrange high society parties in the Kontane "was considered a good practice and exemplary style. In 1888, here celebrating the Aivazovsky, and 1899 m - Pushkin's centenary in 1908 - a monument to Alexander III in Znamenskaya area. In the midst of hostilities of the First World, May 6, 1916, in honor of the twenty-fifth Franco-Russian alliance in which France and Russia pledged to make friends with Germany, the Allies gave the "Kontane" reception, attended by senior dignitaries of the State and the diplomatic corps. The Russian national anthem "God Save the Tsar" on the piano for four hands played by the composer Alexander Glazunov, then rector of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and Alexander Siloti - pianist, conductor and founder of "Concert Siloti. But the French national anthem - banned in the monarchic Russia bloodthirsty "La Marseillaise" - invited to sing Fyodor Chaliapin, a star not only in St. Petersburg stage, but - after the "Russian Seasons", Diaghilev - Paris. Remembers Sergei Makovsky: "Chaliapin sang" La Marseillaise "with such a dramatic enthusiasm with which hardly anyone sang it to him. If we are to sing the song of the French revolution, so that the heart and trembled all heard the alarm bell rock. Prophetic click Chaliapin all covered, carrying and blew away, drew a nonentity ghost transitory reality. " At the request of the public "La Marseillaise" had to encore.